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Topic: How do you store and archive your images? (Read 5908 times)

With my XT and various PowerShots, my backup strategy involved a 500 GB external drive and burning DVD's. With a 60D and 7D, I've had to up the capacity quite a bit. Now it's two 1.5 TB external drives and burning BluRays (25 GB per disc).

On the external drives, which I manually mirror, I keep straight-out-of-the camera images in one directory tree and post processed images in another. I can shoot anywhere from 500-2,000 images per event. Admittedly, when lighting is reliably even (particularly in color), I shoot JPG. But, as things get moe challenging light-wise, more likely to need post work, or more important, I'll shoot RAW. 25 MB RAW images add up in a hurry. Those 1.5 TB drives have nearly 1 TB of photos.

So, as I contemplate another set of 1-2 TB drives, how do you store and archive your images?

canon rumors FORUM

since 2003 went digital storing all archives on DVDby 2008 we hit DVD archive 849... and called it quits to archiving to DVD...shoots are labeled by date then job/event... within folders contain raw proofs selected raws duplicated and final folder containing 16bit TIFF and then duplicated sized jpegs after post.with amount of files per job/event all work is now saved on 1TB removable HD...as the jobs/events are completed/delivered they are placed into year/months archive folders...screen capture the files and placed in archive file for reff in admin computer..as the archive folder fills to 85% full its pulled and set aside as archive only... we use wiebe RTX drive housing and their drive storage boxes... sata drives are now like video cassettes that are stored in water proof case stored in steel storage cabinet.Ive kept to 1TB just for thinking that thats enough stuff on one drive... so far all is good.for DVDs we NEVER placed stickers and only used archival pen to mark clear center area with DVDs number... all stored in tyvek in archival DVD storage boxes... the best DVDs were used and still used... preferring the printable type with heavy white printable surface... in the past ive bought cheap DVD and regretted scratching not the bottom but the top of the DVD on insertion... the thin layer which contains the data on the metallic layer rips and flakes off... scarry.. never again.good luck hope my example leads you to your own system.Brad

oops I failed to mention...system drive contains OS and software...all image folders are on second internal drive or outboard RTF drive...

if you are using Imac or laptop duplicate all image folders to portable or storage drives...I consider any files being saved on the system drive have more potential for loss error or corruption.work and store all image on other drives...

I had all my pictures burned to DVD's but recently I put them all back on my 1,5 TB HD. (That's my OS drive right now, though I'll need to get an SSD for OS soon..). I have the folder "Photo" synched with another 1,5 TB drive. That one used to be an external usb drive but I built it into my PC for a faster synching speed through the SATA connection.

Fairly straightforward, everything goes into aperture on my computer HD and then I do regular backups of my whole HD [via time machine] on to a 1TB external. I keep thinking of backing up to a 3rd device but to have 2 HD failures would be very rare. Also if they do fail, its usually a mechanical part that goes, so the actual data is still safe.

Look up amazon S3 cloud storage. Glacier storage is super cheap to upload to, like super cheap, and then you only pay when you download the stuff back.

There is a point where one can have successfully backup. For me it would be:RAID 5+0 with 2 spare disks in computerNAS RAID 0Offsite NAS RAID 0Glacier cloud storage

I currently only use in computer RAID, an external hard drive and a NAS drive but if my business was a big serious thing then the above list would be sufficient though perhaps with scalability included too.

Uh, guys, Cloud storage isn't an option for many of us. I'm well familiar with Glacier/ASUS etc etc. Price out 4TB of data, growing at at least 1TB/Year, factor in how you'll get it to them (Cable modem isn't going to work), data availability (you still need local copies), plus redundancy and it gets expensive. Plus Cloud doesn't mean safe.

Ultimately nobody cares about your data as much as you do. There's no way a professional photographer (certainly not videographer) could make do with Cloud storage. At best it would work for a light shooting amateur.

My attitude is that data storage costs drop exponentially like all other information technologies, so I store everything and then some. In a few years I'll laugh about the day I fretted about a few TB.

Speaking of which I laugh at the folks who call high mega pixel cameras "mega pickles" (as if that's funny), and then go on to say it will never happen because "oh my god all those pixels will kill your computer and hard drive". Yeah, sure grandpa ...

I have a 6 disk QNAP NAS which backs up my PC's and images. Its a few years old now, but has 12 TB of drives in it. Since it runs Raid, it actually has about 9.2 TB usable. I'm down to less than 2 TB free, so its time to clean up.The drives can be upgraded to larger disks (12 TB Max if one actually existed), but by the time I need them, I'll likely upgrade to a new model NAS maybe with SSD.